Adam Was Exiled to a Land With No Sun and Stood in the River

Adam turned around once. The way back was already closed.

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Cherubim stood at the entrance. In front of them a sword of fire turned and turned, never settling on one direction. He tried east. The blade was there. He walked along the wall and tried again, and the blade swung around to meet him. It was not guarding one road. It was guarding all of them at the same time.

He was not wandering. He was exiled, and the sword behind him made it stick. So he went out into the country on the other side.

A Country With No Sun

The world had been split from the start, made from nothing and then cut. One half was drawn as a circle meant to be lived in. At the center of that circle lay the land God chose. At the center of that land, the city. At the center of the city, the room where the Shechinah (שכינה), God's presence, would come down and stay.

The other half was desert. Nothing was going to grow there. It belonged to Sitra Ahra (סטרא אחרא), the Other Side. Much later a whole nation would spend forty years crossing ground like it, losing ground every time it lost its nerve.

Adam came down in a country called Eretz, and Eretz had no sun.

Not night. Night ends. This was a dark that had never had a morning, a land nobody had lit. He stood in it unable to tell how much time was going by or which way anything lay. Behind him the sword kept turning. It threw the only light he had.

Death Sat in His Mouth

Fear first. Then the shaking. Then a heaviness he had no word for, because nothing in the garden had ever needed one.

He went over all of it. The tree. The eating. The voice walking in the evening. He hated the fruit and he hated being sent out, but in the dark the thing he kept coming back to was worse than either.

He had brought death in.

Not onto himself only. Onto every person who had not been born yet. Each of them was going to die because of something he did in an afternoon, and there was nobody in that country to argue with about it.

He Stood in the Gihon

There was a river.

He went down the bank into it and did not stop at his knees or at his waist. He went until the water came up under his chin, and then he stood still. The current pulled at his clothes. Silt rose around his feet. He kept his mouth just above the line.

He was not washing. He was not drowning. He was putting his whole body where it could be seen how sorry he was, and he meant to stay until that registered somewhere.

The current went past him. He did not move. Water beaded on his beard and dropped back into the Gihon as if even the drops wanted to leave him.

A light lifted off the black water. Thin at first, then steady, the kind of light that sometimes rises out of Gehenna (גיהנם), the place of judgment after death, when a soul's grief has been heard and the one doing the weeping is about to be moved. It crossed toward the garden he could no longer enter. Adam watched it go and still did not climb the bank.

Ordinary Dirt

God brought him up out of Eretz.

Not back through the gate. There was no going back through the gate. He was taken instead to a different land with a different name. Adamah, which is the word for soil, which is the word sitting inside his own name. He had been scooped out of it once. Now he was set down on top of it and told to work it.

There, on ordinary dirt, in ordinary light, his hands found a hoe. The shaking eased. He could tell morning from evening again.

The other country did not go anywhere. It stayed dark and it kept its name. One generation later God passed sentence on Adam's older son for what he had done to his younger son, and the sentence was to be a restless wanderer in eretz. Cain went out to serve it in the land his father had been let out of. Judgment had already been spoken above. It landed on the road under Cain's feet.

Adam stayed on the soil that shared his name. Behind him the sword still turned. Ahead of him the ground would take sweat, and seed, and burial. He put the hoe in. The dark country waited for the next man who could not go home.